Shelter From The Storm: A Hard-Boiled New Orleans Legal Thriller (Tubby Dubonnet Mystery #4) (The Tubby Dubonnet Series)

by Tony Dunbar

  “You paid them?”

  “I wrote a check for $15,000.” Her brow furrowed.

  “Have you had second thoughts?”

  “Yes,” she said regretfully. “I called my son as soon as I got back to my hotel room. You see, I had thought we could take vacations here together. But he got very upset. He looks after me. But it seems he does not want to vacation with me to New Orleans every year. I didn’t know what to do so I took a walk. And I got to talk to Mr. Haygood, the bellboy at the hotel. It seems funny to call him a bellboy because he’s a grown man. He told me that it is very hot here in New Orleans during the third week of August.”

  “That’s the week you bought?” Tubby chuckled.

  “Yes,” she said defensively.

  He composed his face. “It is indeed warm here at that time of the year. Do you want to get out of the contract?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I promised my girlfriend, Sophie, that we would go to Las Vegas together next Christmas, and I realize now that I’ve just spent all my money.”

  “Okay, let’s see how much of it we can get back.”

  “I hate to be this way. The Murchisons were so nice.”

  “They’ll get over it, Miss Lostus. Did you happen to get their first names?”

  * * *

  Collette’s friend Leila had a car, a really funky Mazda, and picked her up at around two o’clock. When they got to Norene’s house they found a backyard full of kids. A couple of the boys were even swimming, and some others had stripped down to bathing suits and were showing off their wintertime tans. It was actually getting cloudy, however, and the main action was around the blue and white Igloo full of Bud Lite.

  Norene jumped up and hugged Collette and Leila when they came through the gate in the wooden fence.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said. “We desperately need more girls. Come on and I’ll introduce you to some of the guys. They go to Tulane.”

  “Ooooh,” Collette said. Tulane. Big Deal. She rolled her eyes.

  So she met Bradley, who was not too tall but was really cute. He had black hair and about two day’s worth of whiskers on his chin,

  “Hey,” he said, smiling to show off his white teeth. “You wanna sit down?” He patted the empty part of the vinyl recliner he was resting on.

  “I’d like a beer first,” she said.

  He asked her to bring him one, too.

  After she fished two dripping bottles from the ice chest, she consented to rejoin him. At least he twisted off the cap for her.

  “Where are you in school?” he asked while running his fingers through his hair.

  “At Newman,” she said. “I graduate in May.” That was stretching the truth by about two years.

  “Going to college?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Somewhere away from here.”

  “What’s wrong with here?” he asked.

  He turned out to be nice, though conceited, and he won points by telling his friends to quit splashing water on her.

  It would have been really pleasant except that it started to rain, and they all had to go inside.

  Norene tried to get everybody to play Pictionary, which was fun, but a couple of the boys were really drunk and started tearing up Norene’s parents’ den. They were throwing the couch pillows around causing the lamps to rock back and forth, and they broke some kind of souvenir glass. It got too loud for Collette and she went looking for Leila to see if she was ready to go home. Unfortunately, Leila had already left without telling her, which was typical.

  Collette plopped down angrily next to Bradley. He was telling jokes with one of his friends. He noticed her sour expression and offered his services. She said she was ready to leave, and he said sure, he would drive her.

  One step out the front door, however, their plans changed.

  It was pouring down rain, and the wind was whipping the trees around in a frightening way. There was water in the street, and they watched a car move through it slowly, pushing out a wake. Bradley’s Nissan was parked in a low spot by the curb, and he ran screaming across the lawn to find that there was already water over his floorboards. After he got done cursing and hopping around, he got his frat brothers to help him push the crippled car into the driveway. When he inspected the saturated carpets he almost broke into tears.

  In the meantime, the water rose another inch in the street, and Bradley began to fret that the slight elevation of the driveway might not save his car much longer. He ran inside dripping and told Collette, who had been watching stoically from the window, that he would call a cab and try to get them both home. He knew a guy with some kind of a tow truck who he could get to come after his car, if they hurried.

  He got busy signals at two cab companies before he finally got lucky.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Before the lights went out, things were going very smoothly in the vault. Blotting out the drone of the generator with earplugs, Big Top methodically applied the business end of the big Hilti drill to the locks of the safe deposit boxes, grinding them to oblivion. He moved slowly along the wall, beginning at the top of each row and working downward to the floor, while Monk and LaRue ransacked each box and put everything they judged to be of value into a pair of canvass mail sacks. Mostly they were finding jewelry, cash, and rare coins.

  “Here’s a bottle of pills,” Monk yelled, holding up an unlabeled brown plastic vial.

  LaRue pointed to the bag, and in it went.

  Most of what got left behind were papers, though LaRue scanned them all, and he kept a few.

  They allowed James to go home at the end of his shift, after making Corelle clock in. To be sure that the SecureGuard headquarters was still cool about the cameras going on and off, they got Corelle to report in. LaRue sat next to him in the booth while he made the call, his handgun pointed at Corelle’s crotch.

  “These TVs is going nuts again,” Corelle told the base.

  “No wonder,” the guy at headquarters said. “We’ve got a downpour here you wouldn’t believe. Lights are going off all around town.”

  Corelle condensed that message when he hung up.

  “He ain’t worried. It’s raining,” he told LaRue.

  The trio had completed most of one whole wall. Just three more to go. Corelle watched them sullenly from the floor where he had been told to sit and be quiet. The bags were bulging with goodies, and all three burglars were feeling the constant adrenaline rush of an excellent score when the lights went out.

  Big Top looked up but kept on drilling with the power from the generator. LaRue tapped on Monk’s shoulder and told him to keep filling the bags while he pushed Corelle back to the dark booth.

  Inside, all the TVs were dead though a couple of green and red lights glowed on the alarm system’s control panel.

  “Call in,” LaRue insisted to the guard.

  Corelle picked up the phone and pressed the number.

  “Line’s dead,” he said and shrugged.

  “Your new job is holding the flashlight,” LaRue told him. “Looks like the weather is on our side.” He allowed himself a thin-lipped smile. He was thinking they could spend the night cleaning out all of the boxes and maybe even take a crack at the vault just for the hell of it on the way out.

  He was wrong, as they found out twenty-five minutes later. It came to Big Top’s attention that there was water on the floor when he set the drill down for a second and got knocked for a somersault by some unseen powerful numbing force. He came back alive with Monk shaking him. LaRue was trying to get the damn generator turned off without electrocuting himself in the process.

  Corelle, the security guard, was face down where he had fallen. He had made an abortive attempt to bolt the room in the confusion, and LaRue had clubbed him with the butt of his pistol. The water was now about an inch deep and rising fast to cover Corelle’s ears.

  “Mama,” Big Top moaned, shaking his head, then his fingers.

  “You stopped breathing there fo
r a minute,” Monk informed him.

  “Whoa,” Big Top crooned.

  LaRue kicked a switch with his boot heel, and the roaring machine shuttered and died. They were left in a sudden silence, until the sound of trickling water got their attention.

  “We’ve got what we came for,” LaRue said. “Looks like the party’s over.”

  “Can you walk?” Monk asked Big Top.

  “I think so,” Big Top said. He tentatively rose to his feet and leaned on the wall.

  “Let’s get all our stuff out of here,” LaRue said.

  “What about the guard?” Monk asked, indicating the limp wad on the floor.

  “Leave him,” LaRue said.

  “He’ll drown, if he ain’t already,” Monk observed.

  LaRue splashed over to the fallen security man and pressed his wet boot squarely on the man’s neck. He gave a quick jump that produced a brutal snapping sound on the floor.

  “I guess we leave him,” Monk said, wiping water from his eyes. “He’ll be a hero now.”

  CHAPTER IX

  So far Bourbon Street had been a bummer. Marguerite had started out with high expectations on Sunday night. She showered off all the grubbiness from her taxi ride. After putting on a white cotton outfit she had bought for this trip she ascended to the hotel’s open-air rooftop bar. She climbed onto a tall stool, allowing the hem of her dress to rise and show off her two best features, ordered a Tequila Sunrise and watched a handsome executive-type man swim. But he toweled off and left. So she allowed herself to get into a long conversation with a salesman from Michigan who finally moved to the stool next to hers. He ordered them both pink rum drinks in tall glasses. Together they soaked up the humid evening breeze, a wall of clouds moving in, ships moving slowly up the river, and the strings of lights flickering on the bridges.

  He had an unusually strong chin, a roving Adam’s apple, and slightly wild eyes, but he might do. The good-looking swimmer returned, dressed in beige slacks and a blue cotton blazer and went to sit at the other end of the bar with a woman who had obviously been waiting a long time for him, so he was off the list. Marguerite ordered another of the syrupy rum drinks.

  At a table near the pool, two men in business suits were talking seriously.

  “It’s the deal of a lifetime,” she heard one say. “The oil’s ready to come gushing out of the ground. If you can just make it all legal.”

  “I don’t think that will present much of a problem,” the other man, hair streaked with silver, replied.

  By then it was completely dark, and Marguerite was thinking of dinner by candle light. But the man with the wild eyes got weepy and started confessing about his wife back home. Off balance and frustrated, Marguerite stomped back to her room and ordered a pizza. The bellhop, Dan, recommended that she call Mama Rosa’s, and he was the one who brought it to her door.

  She tipped the friendly fellow a dollar and got a courtly bow in return. With David Letterman for company, Marguerite ate as much as she possibly could. It was self-destructive, she knew, but she was feeling blue. She also raided the mini-bar in her room for wine coolers and vodka and cranberry juice.

  She fell asleep with a glass in her hand.

  The next morning, Marguerite woke up late, with a large headache, all alone, and the weather was crummy. At least it was so cloudy and gray that it might as well have been raining. She took a quick angry look outside and jerked the curtains shut. She ordered room service for breakfast, and it was not very good.

  But the big pot of coffee they left with her restored her a little, and after she pushed the tray away she decided she might as well check out her very own second-floor balcony. As soon as she stepped outside and leaned over the rail, things started to get more interesting.

  Attracted by her red silk bathrobe, some passersby below tried to engage her in conversation. Her spirits brightened when he suggested she take it off. She twitched her hips experimentally, and he left laughing. After a while someone tossed a string of beads at her, and she put them on, working the plastic clasp under her hair. A little later she took them off and threw them across the street at a man looking at the pictures of strippers on the wall outside the cabaret. Bombed him right in the back of the head. This became a game.

  There sure were plenty of weirdoes walking around down there. Africans in tribal dress. Weight lifters in tutus. Kids tap dancing on the sidewalk, until the hotel staff ran them off. Girls with earrings all over their faces.

  But then it started to rain for real, and she had to run back inside to her dull room.

  * * *

  Two men scampered back to their lodgings from the Lundi Gras pageant by the river which had been interrupted by the sudden rain. They were leaping over puddles in the streets of Paris. That’s how they felt, weaving and laughing down the cobblestoned alleyways of the French Quarter. Edward and Wendell had had a lunch of raw oysters for breakfast and after-dinner drinks for lunch. The stock market had become a foreign concept. The important issue was where to dine later— whether to eat haute at Arnaud’s or bas at The Acme. But now was a good time to head home and be dry, back for a couple of hours of vigorous rest at the grotto, as they referred to their mysterious apartment at the Lafitte’s Lair.

  * * *

  The world that Willie LaRue found when he splashed his way to the brass and glass exit of the First Alluvial Bank was not the same one he had left four hours earlier. Monk and Big Top were pushing the generator and tool chest through the elevator lobby behind him, making gentle waves through the half inch or so of brown water that was pooling in lazy swirls atop the marble floor and draining musically down the steps to the basement and into the deeper crevasses hidden by the elevator doors.

  Everything that LaRue could see was wet. The street had become a canal, its shores marked by the rows of beached cars with water lapping their hubcaps. The sidewalk was submerged in most places. When a UPS truck driver, frantic to escape the flood, blew a futile horn and slalomed through the intersection, sending a wave splashing over the doorsills of the storefronts facing the street.

  LaRue unlocked the bank’s solid doors with the key he had taken from Corelle. He wasn’t worried about setting off any alarm. He doubted if anybody would respond, even if the damn things were working.

  “What happened?” Big Top asked in awe, staring at the curtain of rain falling straight down from heaven. Grape-sized water bullets rebounded six inches when they hit, making the murky brown sea froth and boil.

  “I don’t know,” LaRue said, finding himself disturbed at some deep primal level.

  “Let’s run for the van,” Monk suggested. “This is just one of them crazy New Orleans downpours. It’ll let up in half an hour.”

  “We sure as hell can’t stay here,” LaRue said and set his jaw. He stepped out into the torrent, hugging the side of the building and dragging a heavy canvas sack full of loot.

  It was difficult making any headway. The little wheels of the tool chest, with the second bag of booty riding on top, kept getting hung up on things hiding under the water. The three men, despite the limited protection of the tall buildings, were taking a pounding from the relentless rain. Their mission became manifestly senseless when they rounded the corner and saw that their van was gone. What they would never learn is that it had been towed for the difficult-to-foresee offense of parking on a parade route two hours before a parade. The robbers, however, had no idea whether their getaway vehicle had been stolen or had washed into Lake Pontchartrain, but it was gone.

  LaRue looked helplessly at the sodden office workers who had waited too long to go home and were now huddled for shelter in doorways up and down the street. Some pointed and laughed at them, amused by the idiocy of moving machinery and packages in a deluge. Two young guys and a girl, pants rolled up above the knees, splashed happily down the middle of the street. All of the traffic lights were red. The robbers were calf-deep in water, and the heavens were wide open, joining earth, sky, and the nearby Gulf of Mexico into ec
static congress.

  A stubby pirogue piloted by a bare-chested man with a gray beard sailed past them, navigating the center of Carondelet Street. He waved at them amicably, paddling with graceful strokes.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here. Screw the generator and the tools,” LaRue shouted. “Help me carry this bag.”

  Big Top helped and ended up with the whole sack on his shoulders. Monk got the other one off the tool chest. “I sure do hate to leave the tools here,” he said.

  “You can buy plenty more tools once you get back to the sticks,” LaRue told him angrily. “Let’s go.”

  Safari-like, the party sloshed off down the street.

  “Here comes another boat,” Big Top pointed behind them.

  Two college boys in bathing suits were zipping down the street in a shiny aluminum canoe. They were doing acrobatics with their paddles and yodeling with their mouths open to drink in the rain. They had a case of Abita Beer between them, and they were looking for adventures and girls to save.

  “Don’t lose the damn bags,” LaRue screamed and left Big Top and Monk on the sidewalk. He struggled into the current and waved his arms like a windmill at the canoe. Obligingly the boys steered at him and dug in their paddles to come alongside.

  “Need help?” the one in front called.

  LaRue didn’t answer. He just grabbed the boy’s ears and hair and pulled him headfirst into the water.

  “Steal the boat!” he yelled at his cohorts. While they splashed into the deep water to comply and to stow their treasure aboard, LaRue advanced on the boy in the canoe’s stern. Alarmed by the loss of his mate, the young man raised his paddle in defense. LaRue grabbed it and yanked hard and tumbled the boy over the side.

  The dethroned sailors struggled to regain their footing while Big Top and Monk clambered aboard. LaRue whacked at the bare-backed youths with the flat of the paddle until he had driven them to the sidewalk. Then he jumped in gasping and started stroking. Helplessly, the boys watched their vessel disappear toward Canal Street.